Watch This Thing: Sita Sings The Blues

This film came out in 2008, but I had never heard of it until last month when I saw it reviewed in a favourite films of all time list, and was immediately intrigued. This film can broadly be divided into 3 parts, all told intermittently over the course of the entire film, each of which has a different style of storytelling and animation.

Part 1: The story of the Ramayana (an ancient Hindu epic which tells the story of Rama and the kidnapping of his wife Sita). This part of the story is told entirely through  the music of Annette Hanshaw - an American jazz singer from the 1920s.

Part 2: Three unnamed characters (represented by shadow puppets) discussing their own personal recollections of the story of the Ramayana.

Part 3: This part is set in present day America and tells the story of the breakdown of the marriage between the film's creator Nina Paley and her husband after he moves to India for work.

So, this film is pretty unorthodox, and that combined with the fact that it's centered around a story and a mythology most western audiences probably aren't familiar with, suggest that it might be kind of inaccessible or alienating, but it's so not. This film is straight up adorable and fantastic. Not to mention freaking impressive considering the entire thing was made by just one woman on her home computer, and it's more compelling and heartfelt than a lot of big budget animated films. Rodger Egbert described it perfectly: "I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord... To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle." And yes, I did rip this quote straight from Wikipedia, but the source is here.

All the different elements of this story just work so well together, even though at first they might seem like a strange combination. The shadow puppet section where the narrators discuss the details of the story give it the grounding and context the audience needs to not feel out of the loop and confused by the characters, the music (besides being amazing) gives the movie a more lighthearted tone - as well as making clear the themes of the movie (love and rejection), and the modern storyline shows us the universality of those themes. It's freaking perfect.

I probably could carry on gushing about this film for a lot longer, but I think I'll just leave it here by saying - WATCH IT! It's available on YouTube for free so you have no excuse not to.